Many gauges didn't work during Isaac

One thing that Hurricane Isaac illustrated is that despite spending more than $14 billion on flood defenses in the New Orleans area after Hurricane Katrina, the region doesn't have reliable flood gauges.

Mark Waller/The Times-PicayuneJean Lafitte Mayor Tim Kerner and Jefferson Parish President John Young join sandbagging efforts as Hurricane Isaac lashed the area and waterways churned on Wednesday, Aug. 29, 2012.

The gauges throughout the New Orleans area are a mix of federal and state gauges from a variety of agencies, and many of them don't work. As the Corps of Engineers has been monitoring Isaac over the past few days, they have complained constantly that they couldn't trust some of the readings they were getting.

"We've spent $14.6 billion, and we don't have gauges that enable us to make decisions. We have got to have reliable gauges," District Commander Col. Edward Fleming said Wednesday evening on a conference call. "We've got to get it right. We've got to fix this."

Max Agnew, a coastal engineer who has been charting the storm, complained that valuable data from the storm may not have been recorded. "Gauges are extremely important, and we have lost so much useful information," Agnew said.

When the winds subside, the corps plans to ask its people at all flood defense installations to record the high water marks in their areas before they disappear.